Author Comments

I would like to point out something in case it wasn't obvious to some. These are not stand alone episodes, they are part of a full 20 minute episode. I understand that some by themselves are somewhat boring, but remember these are connected to others. I normally would post them all up at the same time. But since this episode has hit snags and has taken longer than I year, I've just been posting scenes as they've been completed.

Reviews: I appreciate them, and have no problem with tips and/or advice. But immature comments, anything of the like of "this sux" "crap" "garbage" will not be read or even looked at seriously. Don't waste your time and my own. I'm not saying or expecting everyone to like what I do in my free time, but at least be some what mature is all I ask.

Synopsis of scene:
The battle at West Point has come to its conclusion thanks to the help of Animus Praevelo. Coming to help was one thing, but his ulterior motives are revealed. Now Stephen, Mario, Ashley and Heather must face reality and come to a decision on where to go from here.

"Fading Light"
Things are intensifying as the conflict is getting hotter. Demetrius Libertas, an ex representative for the EAP has shown his face once again. His intentions are unknown at the moment. Battles are still waging amongst the various Angel training facilities but all eyes are on New York as Adam Novus tries to fend off the mysterious frames that have advanced.

Reviews

Rated 4 / 5 stars2011-02-15 13:13:50

Getting better

As I am watching these out of order, it is a bit hard to understand what is going on. What matters is this had the best battle scenes so far in the series. It reminds me of the Gundam/Neon Genesis Evangelion robot fights. It was also cool to see some of the characters talk more about themselves to get more familiar with them. That did kind of bother me because it seems like there was too much talking. I guess that sounds kind of shallow, but it was certainly not bad.

I noticed that the blonde looked a lot like Samus Aran. I am very impressed that you managed to get so many people to do voices. None of them were even TomAto or Rina-chan! This series definitley has potential, but it needs to have some more unique qualities to make it really good. The animation could use a little work too.

Rated 3.5 / 5 stars2010-06-11 00:07:18

Reikiba summ up the story but how about animation?

Reikiba pretty much summed up the entirety of my thoughts very nicely (good review by the way) but now that Reikiba seems to have covered how I feel about the story side of things, I'd like to talk about your animation. It's good that you said it was part of a series of episodes or else I would have felt super freakin' lost beyond imagination.

What I'd like about to say about your animating skills is short and sweet. It. Needs. Work. A lot of work. First off all your characters look like they were made in MS paint and all the time they keep going on and on about god knows what all I'm thinking is "ok, that line went from his mouth to his chin and off his face, alright that eye wasn't exactly crisply drawn, wow this guy needs to work on his mouth shapes and syncing. Who drew this, him or his son?" You need to do a lot of editing work before submitting dude. Just look at your work, it's not even small barely noticeable errors. It's more like like large mistakes that go across multiple frames that I can't stop staring at. Also besides some very obvious mistakes, your characters need a face lift regardless. They need some shading done more on the face and some more tones of color rather than have them all just mono tone skin color. A gradient wouldn't kill you. Use bolder out lines and brighter colors not to mention cleaning up all the aforementioned details already listed.

Now that was just your characters. Your battle sequences your actually pretty well made. It's probably because the bots are so darkly colored and the action is quick pace so I don't notice any mistake that might have been made. But that's why it's so important that you DO improve your characters. Because I DO notice all the small mistakes in your character design and I DO notice a flaw here and there in animation. While on other things such as background, I might not notice.

What you need is a better crew to help you out. You need more than just voice actors, you need someone to help edit and refine your work, as well as audio (though the audio was surprisingly good but could be improved), you need feed back from someone other than yourself to help improve what is not to shabby a flash to have just been animated by one person.

Think of this as a diamond in the rough, sure it looks like shit now but run it through a finely tuned machine of editors and revisers and this thing could shine like the heavens in no time!

Rated 3 / 5 stars2010-06-10 23:11:17

*sigh* Before I looked at this, I decided to go through this series from the beginning to keep everything in context.

You've put alot of work into this series. The art is acceptable and the voices are a good touch. But personally, I find the whole story confusing and boring and the characters uninteresting.

I'm assuming this is based off of something--I think you mentioned that in a comment on an earlier episode. However, I have to review this as a standalone story, and I must refer to previous episodes since this is one whole story.

For the most part, the characters seem to have no personality. It may be partially due to the monotone voice acting, but a big part of my apathy is due to the fact that there was very little development or explanation of the characters in earlier episodes. If they are popular characters, then fans may care, but I have no reason to care about what happens to any of them.

The whole series, for me, has been too over-dramatized--even now. Don't get me wrong. I'm not the type of person that just likes death and explosions. A good story can't exist without drama.

However, you focus too much on drama and not enough on the war that's supposed to be going on. You spend more time with dialogue than you need to. Like when they're deciding whether to explore the base or not. That scene was at least twice as long as necessary. In short, you need someone to edit your script.

The characters keep talking or stop to inflect when they should be focusing on what's going on in front of them. At one point in the series, one of the guys is in his frame in the middle of a fight and pauses to exchange a few quips with a girl, then he acts surprised when he gets hit by the enemy several seconds later.

Even if this is a dramatic series, you need to focus on the action more. The fighting just seems like a side-story to all the drama that's going on--and a poorly-explained side-story at that.

In this episode, I've seen more fighting than usual, but I'm still wondering what's going on and why should I care. I just don't feel a connection with any of the characters or what they're doing.

Fair enough. I'm a writer. This is based off my novel series. It was and is pretty much a movie that takes place after the final book. This is the issue that I recognize. I'm an "epic" writer, epic, as in the journey, etc. So I'm used to developing characters over time. And when I went into developing this, it was started off the pretense of having a base of people who followed me when writing the series and were already familiar. Again, another issue that took me a bit to acknowledge. As far as script writing, the problem with being a primary novel writer, it's difficult to switch to an episodic format. At least it was for me because I wrote scripts with the novel mentality which is my error. Plus I didn't take into account the learning of Flash and starting to animate. For instance, everything that happened from Act 1 to now, would be maybe one chapter in my novel format. So going off as this is a movie "Sequel" to the final book I skipped generic character development, not on purpose, I was just thinking of how the primary audience knew the characters and watched them grow for 3 novels. At the time I wasn't planning on releasing any of it here.

Either way, the scripts that follow rectify this, alot. The war that's going on isn't, that's the thing. This is the initial attack that triggers the conflict that is explained by the perpetrator of it in Act 4 and then in 5.

In regards to the characters talking while fighting, that was an error that occurred in translation from script to "damn, how am I going to do this animated when I'm still teaching myself" Though, that one character in particular, that's his personality. But it happened a lot in 3.2 which it shouldn't have, but that was an issue with me moving from writing to visual. The action, and the short bursts of it, has been because I personally wasn't confident enough in being able to animate it. Story telling wise, I agree with you completely, and I would be ignorant to think otherwise.

Like I said, I'm a writer first and that's where my passion is, this was just a project I wanted to do for myself and the fans of the novels when I had them posted that followed it. A lot of the shortcomings are from my lack of experience in writing episodic things and being able to visually represent them properly. So I'm aware of these issues you mentioned, and when I wrote the following scripts I had them in mind and hope to rectify it a lot. Short of making a flash back episode that would reveal the characters more and the background/history. But I haven't had the time and I've left that information on my website for view.

It's a shame there aren't more people with an actual concept of intelligence on this site. But it is nice to see it, even if it's extremely few and far between.